At Colorado Law, seats in most 2L and 3L courses are allocated according to two rounds of “bidding” prior to registration. The purpose of bidding is to increase your chances of getting into the courses you want. Thus, all students are strongly encouraged to participate in bidding so they have as much control as possible over their schedules. In planning your schedule, also keep in mind Colorado Law's graduation requirements.

How Bidding & Registration Work

At the beginning of Round One, 3Ls have 3000 points to “spend,” while 2Ls have 1500. After Round One closes, your reimbursed points for you to spend on any remaining courses in Round Two are displayed in the same window as in Round One. The end of Round Two of bidding results in your actual enrollment in, or being waitlisted for, your chosen courses.

After all students who choose to bid on courses have been enrolled in or waitlisted for the courses they bid on, ALL students will be able to add and drop courses from their schedule (provided there are seats available in the courses and no special permission is necessary to enroll in them) by going to MyCUInfo/Student tab/Search for Classes/Enroll. (Click here for detailed instructions. Please note that adding to your shopping cart is for your planning purposes only; be sure to "submit" to become enrolled.)

Courses for the upcoming term can be found by clicking “Search for Classes” on the Student tab of your MyCUInfo portal. Upcoming courses will be visible and searchable shortly before the bidding and registration period. Students can also find information about a term's overall course schedule as well as individual course offerings in the Academics section of the Law School's website, specifically on the Calendars and Schedules and Courses and Registration pages.

Bidding & Registration Timeline

The Law Registrar will send out term-specific dates and information relevant to bidding and registration via email. Note that some courses are in the traditional registration and bidding system but have nontraditional schedules or structures. The Law Registrar will keep students informed regarding these courses and any changes that occur to a term's courses or course schedule. The general bidding and registration timeline is as follows:

Round One bidding begins/closes.

Round Two bidding begins/closes. Prior to the close of Round Two bidding, you should do the following:

Check your MyCUInfo to be sure you do not have any "holds" on registration. Any holds will be shown on the left side of the page after navigating to the Student tab.

Update your personal contact information on MyCUInfo at the bottom of the screen after navigating to your “Student Center.”

Open registration begins (at which point students can add and drop courses on their own in myCUInfo) and continues until the relevant add/drop deadlines in the following term. Please click “Your Enrollment Dates” under the Student tab of your MyCUInfo portal to check your open registration appointment date.

Instructions on How to Bid

To access your bidding page, go to MyCUInfo > Student tab > Register for Classes > My Academics > Law School Bidding for Current Law Students Only > View/Submit/Change Bid.

In the Law Bidding window, select a course from the dropdown menu and enter the bid points you wish to apply to this first course.

Click the "+" button to bid on a new course. Repeat this process until all of your points are spent. Click the "-" sign to remove a course bid.

You may adjust your bids at any time during each round of bidding. Your initial bids are not locked in until the close of each round, so there is no competitive advantage to bidding early.

Bidding Rules

Each bid must be a unique value. For example, you cannot spend 500 points on two different courses; one bid would need to be 500 and the other 499 or 501.

If you would have been ensured enrollment based on a bid lower than you actually placed, the difference between the points you bid and the points you needed to ensure enrollment will be reimbursed to your bidding account for use in Round Two.

You can bid for (and become temporarily enrolled in) up to 21 credits through the bidding process, but pursuant to ABA standards, you may not remain enrolled in more than 18 credits once the semester starts. Note that after bidding is over if you are waitlisted and a seat opens in a course, if the system "sees" that enrolling you in it will put you over 18 credits total, it will skip over you and enroll the next person on the waitlist. Also note that certain Wintersession or Fall Session courses may not be counted towards the 18 credit cap by the Law School but WILL be counted towards it by the system, so if at any point you need help overriding the cap to enroll in one, email lawreg@colorado.edu.

You can bid for time-conflicted courses, but if you are waitlisted and a seat opens, the system will not enroll you if you still have that time conflict. Instead, it will skip over you and enroll the next waitlisted student without a conflict.

Everyone has a unique, randomly-generated tiebreaker number. If two or more students bid the same number of points on a course, your tiebreaker number determines whether you are in the course, or on the waitlist, and in what order.

First round winners will not be displaced by second round bids, even if those bids are higher. For example, even if a seat in a course could be secured with only 25 points in the first round, your second round bid of 30 points will not displace any first round winners.

If you have any holds on your registration, the system will allow you to bid. ... BUT, if a hold is still there at the end of Round Two, you will lose all winnings, and you will not be enrolled or waitlisted in any courses you bid on.

Bidding Strategies

3Ls: If you want to guarantee that you outbid all rising 2L bids for a particular course, you will need to bid, at the minimum, 1501 points for that course. This ensures that you will be in competition only with other 3Ls for that course.

Remember that if you spent all your points on one course in Round One but get points reimbursed, you may bid those reimbursed points in Round Two. If you spent all your points in Round One and do not get any reimbursed (because you needed all those points to get into a course or on its waitlist), you cannot bid in the Round Two.

Though it is advantageous to participate in both rounds of bidding, if you do not enter any bids by the end of the first round, you can still enter bids during the second.

Be mindful of historic wait list lengths in formulating your bidding strategy. Colorado Law has only recent experience with online course bidding, but some historical data is available for review in the form of term-specific bidding reports showing waitlist lengths after Round One (posted under "Course Registration and Bidding" on the Courses and Registration page of the Law School's website). A key to understanding these bidding reports is below. Note that historical bidding and wait list information should be used for rough strategizing only, as the popularity of courses may depend on numerous factors not reflected on the reports, e.g., which professors were teaching which courses that term, how many sections of a course were being offered, what time the courses were offered, etc. Every semester's course calendar is different and every semester students have different priorities and preferences when it comes to arranging their individual course schedules. Finally, note that not all waitlisted courses are still full by the time classes actually start each term-- so if you end up on a waitlist, stay patient.

Key to Round 1 Bidding Results Reports:

Enrl Cap

Bids

Acc

Wait

Max Bid

Min Bid

2925- 2633

2632- 2340

2339- 2047

2046- 1754

1753- 1461

1460- 1168

1167- 875

874- 582

581- 289

288- 0

12

25

12

13

2925

4

1

1

1

1

2

1

2

4

9

3

Enrl Cap: Number of students allowed in the course (12)

Bids: Total number of bids received for the course this round (25 students bid on it)

Acc: Number of bids accepted (12 students made it into the course)

Wait: Number of students on the waitlist (13- a sticky note has been added on the reports to courses that had waitlists noting the lowest bid amount that was needed to get into the course. Anyone that bid more than that amount would have received the difference back to use in Round 2.)

Max Bid: Highest bid received for this course (2925 points)

Min Bid: Lowest bid received for this course (4 points)

# - #: Range of bids and number of bids that fall into those ranges (One student bid in the range of 2633 to 2925 points, Four students bid from 582 to 874 points, etc.)